


After the Storm

by soliloquize



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Songfic, gansey is going to die and everyone is just trying to deal, if you need a nice cathartic cry this is the fic for you, implied anxiety attacks, lots of angst with a side helping of bluesy fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:31:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliloquize/pseuds/soliloquize
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears<br/>and love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears<br/>get over your hill and see what you find there<br/>with grace in your heart, and flowers in your hair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Storm

**Author's Note:**

> Title/lyrics from "After the Storm" by Mumford and Sons

_After the storm,_

_I run and run as the rains come,_

_And I look up._

 

_On my knees and out of luck, I look up._

St. Agnes, One Week Before

               

                Ronan slipped out of his sleeping boyfriend’s—or whatever the hell Adam was to him— arms.  He’d dropped off hours ago, leaving Ronan alone, raw, and with nothing to do but overthink things like he was picking at an emotional scab.

                It was probably better he stay awake at this point anyway.  There wasn’t a gambler alive who’d take the odds of Ronan not dreaming a night terror right now.

                He found himself gnawing on his own wrist before he remembered Adam removing the leather bracelets earlier in the night.  Ronan snarled under his breath at this discovery, more upset about the disruption of his habit than the pain.  He switched to biting his thumb instead, not hard enough to draw blood, staying just on the right side of “too painful” to remind himself that he was still in control.

                When his father had died, it hit him like an eighteen-wheeler T-boning his BMW at a four way stop Ronan thought was a straightaway, and somehow this was infinitely worse.  For all Ronan had raged at the others for keeping it from him, he was glad, in a perverse way, that he hadn’t known sooner.  It wasn’t the sort of knowledge he’d ever learn to live with.

                Ronan’s experience with grief included one brief encounter with a dumbfuck counselor who had tried to get him to talk about his feelings in terms of those stupid stages.  Before Ronan had a chance to give her a parting wave with a single finger, she’d told him that he struggled with the _acceptance_ stage.

                He took a shaky breath, the ghost of a sob, and the memory of Gansey’s confession washed over him.  The helpless anger he’d felt then had muted itself and was now dangerously close to despair.

                “You’re lucky you didn’t break your hand,” Adam had said after the fact, upon seeing the new hole in Ronan’s wall.  Ronan supposed this was true, but it seemed horribly irrelevant.  He only recalled it now because it was the least painful moment of the afternoon, in the way that it’s less painful to stab out your own eye than to be flayed alive.

                Adam had kissed Ronan’s bloody knuckles with unbelievably tenderness, but he’d said no words of comfort.  Adam Parrish was not one to make promises he couldn’t keep.

                Ronan found himself downstairs, in the church proper.  He sank down in the pew where he had dreamed Chainsaw and bowed his head automatically.

                Niall’s tales of being descended from gods had never seemed beyond belief, Adam could work magic, Noah had survived his own death, and Ronan himself had seemingly divine powers of creation, but for all that he knew there was a higher power.

                “Please,” he begged, his desperation leaving him naked.  “Please, God.  Save him.  _Christ_.  Please.”

 

 

_And I took you by the hand, and we stood tall.  Remembered our own land; what we lived for._

300 Fox Way, One Month Before

 

                300 Fox Way could generally be described as _bustling_ , but on this particular morning, the level of activity had managed to bypass that moderate label altogether, skipping straight to _absolutely hectic_.

                “Blue, if your mother is wearing that thing to her wedding, you’d better come put it on her yourself,” Calla snapped after a brief fight with a mysterious garment of Blue’s own construction.

                “It’s not a wedding,” Maura said with almost the same level of vehemence.

                “Commitment ceremony, ritual, wedding, you can please _bite me_ , madam bride,” Calla said, waving her hands.

                Blue entered the bedroom with a demand to know what was going on; Calla had been under the impression that the garment Blue made was a veil of sorts, leaving Blue to rescue the poor thing from Maura’s head.  It was in fact a skirt, make up of a conglomeration of a crocheted shawl, some colorful ribbon, a dress everyone in the house had outgrown, and a few feet of lace carefully harvested from one of Persephone’s old shirts.

                Gansey had declared it the quintessential wedding wear with some delight—“It’s made of old things into something new, the dress and lace are borrowed, and it’s very Blue!”  Maura had insisted again that this was not a wedding; Blue snorted kindly, and other assembled parties rolled their eyes with varying degrees of fondness.

 

                Wedding or not, it was an indisputably lovely event.  Gwenllian crooned wordless melodies for most of the ceremony, somehow adding ambiance rather than annoyance.  Jimi said a blessing of her own invention, as did Artemus, which could have been strange but wasn’t, perhaps because Mr. Gray was clearly appreciative that he spoke it in Old English as well as Welsh.

                The ceremony itself consisted mainly of binding Maura and Mr. Gray’s wrists together with a strange silvery thread while a small militia of friends and family crowded in the reading room around them.  It culminated simply with the couple locking eyes and saying _I love you_ while glowing in a way that was completely magical and not at all supernatural.

                Blue leaned her head on Gansey’s shoulder, wondering if it was normal for daughters of single mothers to find themselves so moved by the addition of a step-father to their immediate family.  Gansey squeezed her hand in return, and Blue’s thoughts suddenly echoed the just-spoken vow.

                _I love you_.

                As though he could read her mind, Gansey tilted his head down so she could see his foolishly large grin.  His wire frames slipped down his nose, and Blue pushed them back up with a feathery light finger.  He’d been wearing his glasses more and more often, and Blue liked to imagine it was for her—because she liked them, because they provided her an excuse to touch his face.

                Their moment came to an end when Maura, makeup already a tear-smudged tribute to Persephone’s absence, came over to hug her daughter.  Blue gave her a kiss on the cheek and Mr. Gray a sassy comment about not obeying a curfew, should he be tempted to try to exercise any paternal authority.  She softened the declaration with a hug while Gansey drifted away to Adam and Ronan and Noah, leaving Blue free to go on to play a verbal juggling game with all those family members she did not live with.  Her already full heart gave a comfortable tug at the sight of their four utterly contradicting forms across the room, all banded together in self-defense against the sea of strangers.  She like that they had come.  Her family always felt impossibly huge, but Blue didn’t mind another four members.

 

                It was unseasonably warm, so food was set up outside to encourage people to migrate out of the reading room.  An ancient record player was brought out to play an even older record of the “1812 Overture”.  Blue dabbled in a plate of potato salad and gloried in the sunshine, lazily leaning back against the big tree to watch Ronan and Noah and Adam toss food for the others to catch in their mouths.  She laughed when a small tart smashed into Ronan’s cheek and covered his face in filling, and continued to snicker as Gansey went to intervene before it could escalate into a full blown food fight.

                “You’re such a dad,” she informed him when he came to sit next to her.

                “I think Ronan sees me as more of a mother figure, actually,” Gansey said, playing with the only-sort-of-purposefully frayed hem on her skirt.  It hit below her knees, so Blue was extremely miffed at how disproportionally hot her face grew in response to this attention.  She got her revenge by reaching a hand up to mess up his collar, letting her fingers linger on his neck for just a moment longer than necessary.  She was rewarded with a flush that spread up to the tips of his ears.

                Normally this was where she began to wish she was a usual girl, the sort of girl who could sneak off into the woods with her true love and kiss him for as long as they could get away with.  But this moment, right as it was, was golden and perfect and Blue could almost believe that nothing bad would ever happen to ruin it.  It wasn’t a sensible belief, but today Blue was willing to trade sensibility for happiness, and she didn’t want to ruin it by wishing.

                “Blue, may I have this dance?”  Gansey inclined his head as he said it—a bow modified for someone sitting with someone else more or less on their lap.  Blue almost teased him for the formality, but instead she just nodded, and they rose hand in hand to join the eclectic couples that were already twirling and swaying around the small lawn.  Gansey attempted at first to lead her through a proper ballroom dance, but after Blue stepped on his feet for the fourth time, he moved his hands down to her waist, slowly enough to give her time to object, slowly enough for her breath to catch in her throat, and they simply swayed in place.

                With her head against his chest, Blue could hear his heartbeat—strong, steady, moving as quickly as her own.  It was a new kind of giddiness, the thought that she could be responsible for his accelerated pulse, his reddened ears, the earnest nervousness in his invitation to dance.

                She kept her eyes opened as they turned on the spot, not wanting to miss anything about this moment.  She saw Maura leading the Gray Man in a waltz that was horribly out of time with the music, and Calla’s only dance partner was her drink.  Her gaze landed on Adam, and she felt the normal tug of apprehension, but he was watching Ronan and looking something close to content.  The first fireflies were beginning to appear in the early evening twilight, and the little cousins ran after them.

                “I’ve tried to imagine the feeling of finding Glendower,” Gansey murmured with his jaw resting gently on her head.  “And I have no doubt it will be perfectly wonderful, but it’s hard to believe I could be any happier than I am right now.”

                “Let’s stay like this forever, then,” Blue said into his lavender dress shirt.

                “Okay,” he agreed.  “Forever.”

 

 

 _And I won’t die alone, and be left there_.

Monmouth, One Year Before

 

                “ _Gansey?_ ”

                “ _That’s all there is._ ”

                His own voice on the recording was not at all something Gansey had expected from his St. Mark’s Eve.  Hours later the peculiarity was still bouncing around in his head in lieu of sleep.  He didn’t know what to make of the discovery.  His usual role was to come in and assemble the puzzle after the fact using the benefit of impartial viewership, the ability to see the larger picture, but now he was himself one of the pieces.

                It unnerved him, this inability to be objective.  Implications tickled at the back of his mind and he felt his breath catch in his throat.

                _Whose voice is the girl’s_? he asked himself instead.  _Was this an exchange tossed from the future by the ley line?  Were there people there last night I couldn’t see?  Were there apparitions of some kind?_

                Removed questions.  Safe questions.  Important things for him to focus on figuring out that did not force him to confront anything.  His own voice was a coincidence, a trick of the line.

                Gansey didn’t believe in coincidences.  He brought his knees to his chest and leaned his forehead down, feeling the springs of his mattress press into his buttocks.  He concentrated on inhaling and exhaling until the buzzing in his head subsided.

                He didn’t believe in coincidences, but he could believe in magic.  He could believe in Ronan and Adam, who’d been his cheeseburger-bearing saviors just this morning.  He could believe that the search for Glendower was something wonderful in the most fundamental sense—literally full of wonder—and not something to fear.

                He could believe in a good plan.  They were going to the psychics tomorrow, an endeavor sure to produce something of interest.  He could believe they were making good progress, and would continue to do so.

                His belief that they would eventually succeed was more akin to a pathologically strong hope, but he counted it nevertheless.

 

                Carefully, he did not ask himself if he believed he wouldn’t die this year.

 

 

_Because death is just so full, and man so small.  I’m scared of what’s behind and what’s before._

Cabeswater

 

                “ _Gansey_.”

                She said it raggedly, as soon as they broke apart from the kiss.  She hadn’t even opened her eyes, though her arms were still around his neck.  He was impossibly touched by how fiercely she held him—he who was simply Gansey, no more important or impressive than that.  Just Gansey, and she was pressing herself against him as though to physically shield him from the inevitable.

                “Jane,” he managed around the lump in his throat.  He brought a hand up to her face and caressed it as gently as he could, fingertips just brushing her cheekbone, moving to push back the few despondent chunks of hair that had escaped their clips to cast limp shadows on her face.

                The rain pattered beatifically down on them, warm for so early in the spring.  The thunder that was absent in the storm was more than apparent in Ronan’s clenched fists, and Adam’s face dripped tears in far greater abundance than the rain.  Gansey’d already said as much of a good-bye to them as he was able.

                Gansey wanted to kiss Blue again, he wanted to scream, he wanted Glendower to descend miraculously from the heavens on a sunbeam while angels sang—anything, _anything_ , to make this better.  Or easier, at least, for his friends.

                Instead, he felt his legs start to tremble and he could suddenly hear his own quick heartbeat with terrible precision.

                “Jane, I am going to fall,” he said in a carefully measured tone.  He half collapsed as she slowly knelt, and they slid to the forest floor together.  She was still holding him with a ferocious tightness as he lay in her lap.

                “Gansey,” Blue said again, as though his name was a question, or else the answer to one she had wondered for a long time.

                “Do you remember that night when we went driving?” he whispered.  Blue nodded, lips pressed tight, and though her eyes shone like small stars, she’d yet to shed any tears.  “We were like kings on that moment, Jane.  The whole world spread out for us to see, shining—

                “It felt like the only thing I couldn’t do was kiss you.”

                “Well—you’ve done that now,” Blue said.  Gansey could feel her stomach spasm against his cheek as the words wrenched a sob out of her.

                “Then I can die happy.”  He meant it as a joke, gallows humor, an instinctual suppression of his own terror, but he couldn’t keep his voice from breaking.

                “No,” Blue insisted.  “You’re not dying.  I won’t let you.”

                “Technically, we’re all dying.”  He ghosted his fingers along the back of her hand, and she grabbed them and held on like she was going to physically anchor him to the mortal plain.

                It was an interesting limbo he was in, Gansey thought, as his vision slowly ebbed away.  He’d thought it would happen all at once, that death worked in binary—either on or off, alive or dead.  He hadn’t realized there’d be so much in between, all this time he was neither dead nor alive but _dying_.

                _I’m scared_ , he wanted to say.  _Jane, I don’t know what comes next, and I’m scared._   He couldn’t say it though, not when she already looked so shattered.  Besides, he was an explorer, an investigator; the unknown stood for opportunity, not fear.

                He watched Blue’s face, swimming above him. Flowers had appeared, beautiful white wildflowers, in her hair, framing her face, floating gently down with the rain.  Gansey wasn’t sure if they were the product of Cabeswater or his own hazy consciousness, but the sight was almost as beautiful and remarkable as Blue herself, and he kept the image in his mind even as his vision went dark.

 

 

_But there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears._

Connecticut, One Year After

 

                The first thing Adam did after returning from spring break was go for a run.  It helped to be back in New Haven, which had the happy attribute of not being Henrietta.  The city was crowded, busy, and absolutely overrun with pigeons, in contrast to the sleepy, stagnant town of Adam’s birth.

                He even appreciated the pigeons, in that they were not, at least, ravens.

                Jogging had never been Adam’s preferred activity.  In high school, he’d rarely had the time and energy to spare, and his jobs involved enough manual labor to keep him in reasonable shape.  Then the end of his senior year there was suddenly no more studying to do, with AP exams finished and graduation only a month away, the trailer factory had been shut down for some sort of inspection, and Adam was left with a desperate need to do _something_.  That first time, he’d pulled on the battered, oil stained sneakers he always wore around the garage and let his feet pound the packed earth on the side of the road until he started dry heaving from the exertion, clenching his fists hard enough for his nails to draw blood in his palms, and realizing that his grief—his _guilt_ —was not something he could outrun.

                Adam sometimes felt that he’d spent his entire life running from something or other.  He liked that he ran now because he chose to, because it was something that he, Adam Parrish, wanted to do for no other reason than that he enjoyed it.

                It was indulgent in the way Eve’s bite of the apple was indulgent.  This wry thought was all it took for Blue’s voice to pipe up in the back of his mind and demand that he _stop being so hard on yourself, dammit_.  It was the last thing she had said to him before flying off to South America, almost a year ago, but she signed all her letters with the same refrain in case he forgot.

                He usually didn’t.  But _usually not_ wasn’t the same as _never_.  Adam sometimes wondered if he’d just grown so used to the conviction that it had been his fault, that he should-have-could-have found a way out and failed that he’d just acclimated to the guilt rather than moved on.

                He wished he could have been able to see Blue, even though he hadn’t stayed in Henrietta over break.  He’d only stopped at 300 Fox Way on his way through to hug Maura and allow Ronan to engage in a brief battle of wills with Calla.  By all reports, Blue was incredibly enthusiastic about her work with a nonprofit conservation group, and they all pretended that was the only reason she hadn’t yet managed a visit home.

                But Adam wanted her advice.  He wanted someone who understood his ambition better than Noah and his desire to escape better than Ronan.  He wanted to know what the right decision was when his academic counselor said it would be impossible for him to keep taking history electives if he was going to get his engineering prerecs out of the way in time to complete the major.

                He wanted to know if it was okay that sometimes he went days without thinking of Gansey, and other times the boy who had been his brother cluttered his thoughts and crowded out everything else until all Adam could do was run and run and run.

                There was no reason to think Blue might have the answers, but she might at least be asking the same questions.  They were all a little lost without their king.

                Adam took a moment to center himself in the rhythm of his feet hitting the pavement, breathing in-in-out, in-in-out.  Running was straightforward, inherently possessed of direction; start at Point A and keep going until you get to Point B.

                He had thought life would be like that.  Work, Aglionby, Ivy League college, success.  Technically he was still on that track.  But material success wouldn’t have been enough for Gansey—the concept of financial insecurity was so alien to him that pursuing money never seemed worthwhile.  Gansey had wanted to make a difference.

                _You made a difference to me, Gansey_ , Adam thought.  _To all of us._

 

_And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears._

_Get over your hill and see what you find there,_

_With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair._

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out it's really easy/painful to apply Mumford and Sons lyrics to trc angst. I may or may not choke up every time I listen to the Sigh No More album now...
> 
> In TOTALLY unrelated news, I'm considering making a Glendower and Sons series of Mumford and Sons songfics, so I'd love feedback on this one-- I'm also on tumblr as @blue-warren! And if you need to be cheered up, my fic The Jacket is shameless pynch fluff.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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